Orange County cities aren’t shy about firing up the P.R. machine to call attention to their own environmental projects. Solar panels, low-emission vehicles, recycling, energy conservation — it’s a brave new world of green.

But who, exactly, is doing what? And who isn’t?

Those are the questions behind the questions — specifically, a 72-question survey being sent to all Orange County cities by the Sierra Club’s Orange County Global Warming Committee.

The committee, with about 20 members, realized that while a few individual projects are well known, there is no centralized way to track the green practices of the county’s 34 cities.

“We started with the concept of, ‘Let’s start a repository,’” said Jennifer Searfoss, a health care industry executive and a member of the committee.

They’ve received 20 responses so far, she says, among them Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Anaheim, Westminster, Orange, Mission Viejo, Garden Grove.

“It is a campaign to engage city leaders to think about opportunities to decrease energy consumption, which just happens to decrease your carbon footprint,” she said. “It’s definitely an opportunity for cities to learn from one another.”

Searfoss says the committee isn’t yet ready to share their findings; they want to gather more responses and conduct more anlaysis.

But already, the effort, called “Juicing Orange County,” has begun to attract wider notice. Searfoss also is a member of the League of Women Voters, who chose her to be part of its delegation to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen next month largely because of her work on the city survey.

The survey includes questions about each city’s vehicle fleet, lighting, energy production and consumption, green building, public engagement and other topics.

It began with a Sierra Club effort called Cool Cities, itself inspired by the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement that began in Seattle in 2005. So far, 219 mayors around the nation have pledged to reduce their carbon emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The Cool Cities campaign also attempts to push cities to reduce energy consumption and emissions.

Searfoss said she got hooked on environmental issues as a young girl growing up in Monterey and learning of the plight of the California condor.

In her present work in health care, she also sees close parallels between the environment and human health, including the possible role of climate change in the resurgence of some diseases, such as dengue fever.

“That’s how I got engaged in climate change,” she said. “I still see an incredible need, and I’m not seeing the level of commitment as I would have hoped.”

Watch this space in coming weeks for the Sierra Club’s survey results.

(Register photo of solar panels being installed in Huntington Beach by Michael Goulding.)

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